Three related items

This is less a newsfeed item and more a blog post, connecting up some ideas to do with changing our thinking about.

First, China has been approached to help with the eurozone crisis. A member of China’s central bank monetary policy committee, a Professor Li, said: “It is in China’s … interest to help Europe because they are our biggest trading partner.”

He also said that the Chinese government might ask European leaders to refrain from criticising China’s currency policy.

In other words he said that China might take advantage of the situation to seek to buy Europe’s silence on certain matters.

This echoes yesterday’s post (the second of the three items) which revealed how the Chinese government would have preferred to restrict information about a toxic petrochemicals plant, its high speed rail crash this year, or the driving abilities of the son of an army general.

The underlying aim of both these different types of information-withholding is to enable one group of people (in this case, members of the Chinese government) to maintain a position of power and control over other groups people: other Chinese people, American people, and also (if the deal went ahead) over the Europeans in the middle.

The third and final item is contained in this video.

It proves how inequality harms everyone. Even those who imagine themselves to be better off.

Finally, this article says that “Italy’s centre-right government is turning to cash-rich China in the hope that Beijing will rescue it from the financial crisis by making ‘significant’ purchases of Italian bonds and investments in strategic companies.”